They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

But don't blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she's still experimenting.

And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.

Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.

All that counts is the truth. Without it you're basically just juggling people's daft ideas.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.